


Grieve the Night

by SofterSoftest



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: F/M, I gave myself an hour to finish edit and publish this so this is what you get, No Dialogue, not quite violaf but not quite NOT either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:20:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29180157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SofterSoftest/pseuds/SofterSoftest
Summary: After the Island, Violet sneaks into Olaf’s abandoned home. (Grief finds her, no matter how hard she tries to outrun it.)
Relationships: Violet Baudelaire/Count Olaf
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7





	Grieve the Night

  
_"Grief, a type of sadness that occurs most often when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it."_   
  


\- Lemony Snicket, _The Carnivorous Carnival_

*

She arrives near midnight.

Violet opens the front door with the full-bellied moon at her back, watching as every surface casts a long, lingering shadow. There are still mounds of dust and dirt and dry leaves from three seasons past blanketing the floor. Still the curling staircase with its clutter of eyes on the walls above. There is broken furniture, and broken windows, and broken picture frames shattered to the floor long ago. Though, no footprints. No signs of life.

_ No witnesses, _ Violet thinks with relief as she crosses the threshold.

She pulls a flashlight from her bag, flips the switch, and shuts the door behind her. Strangely, she does not feel like an intruder. Trudging through the front room of Count Olaf’s derelict home, Violet is calm with entitlement and repression. At one point in time, through one way or another, she would have inherited all of it.

Every tilting hall and crumbling floorboard draws her further inside. She passes the grand entrance to linger in the kitchen, still smelling of damp and mold, still strung with cobwebs. There are more holes in the walls than she remembers. More drafts, more leaks, more evidence of rot. Her flashlight’s beam swings over tipped bottles of wine, dim with dust. They are not dimpled with fingerprints. Not wet with recent use. Seeing this, she leaves them behind.

Violet creeps through the house, feeling nothing. Above all, she is silent, hardly an audible footstep or breath. It is one thing he taught her, among the many - how to stay silent and small. How to disappear. Especially in this house, where one wrong step could have sent Olaf’s attention her way.

Her mind skitters away from memories of his eyes on her, in rage or appreciation or indifference. She does not want to remember how his attention had made her feel - caustic, unstable, overwhelmed with disgust and want.

Upon arrival, she had braced herself for a meltdown. Had wondered if she would find Olaf’s ghost peering at her from cracked doors or cracked windows or cracked mirrors. She imagined him hurting her all the way from his shallow grave on the Island, surely long swallowed by the sea.

Now, however, she cannot even imagine it. Not in this house, dead as him. Mind numb and silent as shadow, she sneaks to the back of the home, finding nothing of interest. No clues. Nothing too memorable. Nothing worth grieving. She even climbs to the tower, which is dim and empty as a tomb. When climbing the steps that led to the trapdoor, Violet wondered if she would find her wedding dress and is grateful and disappointed all in one that it was not there, lying on the floor like the corpse of her girlhood.

Exploring the rest of Olaf’s home, forgotten in death and abandoned in time, yields very little. She only feels a brief stab of an emotion she later regrets acknowledging -  _ grief  _ \- when she explores Olaf’s bedroom and spots his rusted straight razor on his bedside table. She takes it into her hands, feeling the cold metal and the hefting weight to it, and takes it into her pocket without consideration. It is then, with its weight on her hip like a physical touch, that Violet represses her brief, gutting grief.

Until she finds the car.

Aside from the rust, it is just as she remembers it. Dark and sleek and still as foreboding as the man who drove it. It rests on the side of his house covered in an old tarp gone black with wet leaves. As she uncovers it, Violet allows herself to ponder its presence, its missing timeline in the links of her memory. She does not know who drove it from the burning Hotel Denouement back to Olaf’s home or how long it had been waiting for a steady hand to come along and start it. Violet cracks the door to the smell of old leather, mold, and a lingering scent that is very much Olaf. 

It is a scent she sometimes catches when emerging from her worst dreams - an aftershave so old it is reduced to fumes, a haze of sweat, the subtle stink of misery, char, and sweet breath like wine or raspberry cupcakes. It is a sentimental smell, even through her mounting devastation.

Here is the hesitation she did not feel before. As if entering the car might be a trespass too severe, too personal. As intrinsically repulsive as stepping atop a grave, right before the headstone. Violet lingers at the driver’s side door in the darkness and spitting rain, eyes on the wheel with its dents and peeling leather. After several moments of deliberation, she slides inside and shuts the door quickly. It sounds louder than it ought to, the clapping of the door, the scratch of her dress on the seat, and, from underneath the floor mat, a faint jingle of keys.

Violet’s breath catches. For a reason she could not say, she looks to the rearview mirror, seeing nothing but the empty seats. Her hands shake as she scrambles for the keys, twisting them over and over, but the car does not start.

In her disappointment, she wonders how she might repurpose the car. Sleeplessness presses in on her, and Violet cannot think of a specific invention, though she recognizes the emotional appeal of recycling it - changing its make until it is not Count Olaf’s car, but something helpful. Something good.

It feels unspeakably wrong.

Over time, Violet moves to the back seat. She recalls her various trips in the very same spot, watching the rain drizzle off the windows. Remembers Sunny on her lap, or pressed close and safe between her and Klaus. She remembers her constant dread, and Olaf’s eyes watching her heavily in the mirror.

Once she is sick of nostalgia, she debates shredding the interior to ribbons with the straight razor. She debates tinkering under the hood so she can drive to Briny Beach, right into the sea. Passion flares in her chest at each idea, quickly snuffed as the rain continues to fall. Violet slumps until her cheek rests against the seat, curling her knees close.

When she dozes, she thinks about the island. How the tide has surely risen and washed their makeshift graves into the water. Despite her best efforts, Violet pictures each wave passing over Olaf’s plot, opening it. She pictures his pitiless hands, drifting open in the water.

Sunrise warps the darkness around her. Violet does not sleep. As pink tints the sky, she imagines sand sinking into an empty hole. She imagines bones in the sea. She imagines herself, drowning in her wedding dress. She imagines Olaf, teasing her about missing him.

Later, Violet will take the trolley into the city. She will wander. She will go home. But for now she sits in the back of Olaf’s car with his empty, abandoned home at her back, and, for the very first time since his death, allows herself to cry.

*


End file.
